This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. ...
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This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. The author of this book gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. The text weaves together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world. As the book explores the culture of the kazoku, it places each subject in its historical context, and analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders. But the book is not simply about the elite, but about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.Less

Above the Clouds : Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility

Takie Sugiyama Lebra

Published in print: 1993-01-29

This book provides an ethnographic study of the modern Japanese aristocracy. Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. The author of this book gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. The text weaves together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world. As the book explores the culture of the kazoku, it places each subject in its historical context, and analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders. But the book is not simply about the elite, but about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study ...
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Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, this book focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers lived. The book explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. It highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The book brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.Less

After the Massacre : Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai

Heonik Kwon

Published in print: 2006-11-10

Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, this book focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers lived. The book explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. It highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The book brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation.

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in ...
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Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period—a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. It focuses on what it calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies, and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. The book casts its net widely. It not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, the book argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.Less

Alliance Capitalism : The Social Organization of Japanese Business

Michael Gerlach

Published in print: 1997-08-04

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American ones. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period—a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. It focuses on what it calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies, and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. The book casts its net widely. It not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, the book argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come ...
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For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? This book answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.Less

Arbitraging Japan : Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Published in print: 2013-01-01

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? This book answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.

“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism ...
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“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.Less

Aryans and British India

Thomas Trautmann

Published in print: 1997-03-31

“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.

A study of the political, social, and cultural history of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan, this book treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial site for the development of new state ...
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A study of the political, social, and cultural history of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan, this book treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial site for the development of new state structures and new forms of social power. Focusing on the years of rapid industrialization and imperialist expansion (1895 to 1945), it challenges widely held conceptions of a Japan that did not, until recently, experience delinquency and related youth problems. The author reconstructs numerous individual life stories in the worlds of home, school, work, and the streets, and relates the changes that took place during this time of social transformation to the broader processes of capitalist development, nation-state formation, and imperialism.Less

Bad Youth : Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan

David Ambaras

Published in print: 2005-12-09

A study of the political, social, and cultural history of juvenile delinquency in modern Japan, this book treats the policing of urban youth as a crucial site for the development of new state structures and new forms of social power. Focusing on the years of rapid industrialization and imperialist expansion (1895 to 1945), it challenges widely held conceptions of a Japan that did not, until recently, experience delinquency and related youth problems. The author reconstructs numerous individual life stories in the worlds of home, school, work, and the streets, and relates the changes that took place during this time of social transformation to the broader processes of capitalist development, nation-state formation, and imperialism.

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives ...
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This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.Less

Bitter and Sweet : Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China

Ellen Oxfeld

Published in print: 2017-05-23

This book examines the value of food in rural China through an ethnographic study of a Hakka village in Meixian, a county in northeast Guangdong Province. By examining the role of food in the lives of one community, the book attempts to show how food in rural China is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value both within, but also beyond the market economy. It examines the role food plays in the organization of labor, the recollection and generational transfer of historical and personal memories, systems of exchange and relationships between humans, and between humans and the cosmos, moral discourses and judgements, and in sociality and emotion. It hopes to show how a focus on food provides a somewhat more complex and nuanced picture of contemporary rural China than accounts which emphasize only the decline of social cohesion, rise of individualism, and the end of all moral economies in the wake of industrialization and the global capitalist market. Rather, a focus on food provides a lens into the complex interplay between the forces of cultural continuity and rupture, ties to the land and the pull of the city, family duties, sociality, and the growth of individualism, and an economy based on money and profit versus older forms of exchange that privilege social obligations.

This book provides a fascinating look at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihādists. Drawing on a long-term fieldwork in the disputed borderlands between Pakistan and India, the book explains how ...
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This book provides a fascinating look at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihādists. Drawing on a long-term fieldwork in the disputed borderlands between Pakistan and India, the book explains how refuge-seeking has become a socially and politically debased practice in the Kashmir region and why this devaluation has turned refugee men into potential militants. It reveals the fraught social processes by which individuals and families produce and maintain a modern jihād, and how Muslim refugees have forged an Islamic notion of rights—a hybrid of global political ideals that adopts the language of human rights and humanitarianism as a means to rethink refugees' positions in transnational communities. Jihād is no longer seen as a collective fight for the sovereignty of the Islamic polity, but instead as a personal struggle to establish the security of Muslim bodies against political violence, torture, and rape. The book describes how this new understanding has contributed to the popularization of jihād in the Kashmir region, decentered religious institutions as regulators of jihād in practice, and turned the families of refugee youths into the ultimate mediators of entrance into militant organizations. This provocative book challenges the idea that extremism in modern Muslim societies is the natural by-product of a clash of civilizations, of a universal Islamist ideology, or of fundamentalist conversion.Less

Body of Victim, Body of Warrior : Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists

Cabeiri deBergh Robinson

Published in print: 2013-03-08

This book provides a fascinating look at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihādists. Drawing on a long-term fieldwork in the disputed borderlands between Pakistan and India, the book explains how refuge-seeking has become a socially and politically debased practice in the Kashmir region and why this devaluation has turned refugee men into potential militants. It reveals the fraught social processes by which individuals and families produce and maintain a modern jihād, and how Muslim refugees have forged an Islamic notion of rights—a hybrid of global political ideals that adopts the language of human rights and humanitarianism as a means to rethink refugees' positions in transnational communities. Jihād is no longer seen as a collective fight for the sovereignty of the Islamic polity, but instead as a personal struggle to establish the security of Muslim bodies against political violence, torture, and rape. The book describes how this new understanding has contributed to the popularization of jihād in the Kashmir region, decentered religious institutions as regulators of jihād in practice, and turned the families of refugee youths into the ultimate mediators of entrance into militant organizations. This provocative book challenges the idea that extremism in modern Muslim societies is the natural by-product of a clash of civilizations, of a universal Islamist ideology, or of fundamentalist conversion.

Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of ...
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Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of migration laws and labor policies, the often poignant and painful experiences of migrant mothers, and the ambivalent roles of fathers. Within the context of contemporary global capitalism, this research yields a deeper and fuller understanding of the practical problems and the cruel disappointments faced by those who take part in “guest worker” programs. New insights about the problem—or the crisis—of temporary migration, which is too often not temporary, are revealed through ethnographic research that attends to the everyday lives and stories of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies. The book’s arguments are threefold. First, temporary migrant workers are never only workers. They are people too. But the women who dare to become mothers are often deemed not only bad workers, but also ungrateful or immoral women. Second, the laws and policies designed to enforce a rotating door for workers and to prevent overstaying and illegal work, often create the opposite results. Some women overstay and become pregnant, and many overstay because they are pregnant. Third, women who return home as “single mothers” face severe stigma and economic pressures that propel them to continue in a migratory cycle of atonement: an ongoing, self-perpetuating, precarious pattern of migration. Mothers and babies thus reveal the inequalities of citizenship and belonging and the precariousness of migrant labor.Less

Born Out of Place : Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor

Nicole Constable

Published in print: 2014-03-14

Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of migration laws and labor policies, the often poignant and painful experiences of migrant mothers, and the ambivalent roles of fathers. Within the context of contemporary global capitalism, this research yields a deeper and fuller understanding of the practical problems and the cruel disappointments faced by those who take part in “guest worker” programs. New insights about the problem—or the crisis—of temporary migration, which is too often not temporary, are revealed through ethnographic research that attends to the everyday lives and stories of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies. The book’s arguments are threefold. First, temporary migrant workers are never only workers. They are people too. But the women who dare to become mothers are often deemed not only bad workers, but also ungrateful or immoral women. Second, the laws and policies designed to enforce a rotating door for workers and to prevent overstaying and illegal work, often create the opposite results. Some women overstay and become pregnant, and many overstay because they are pregnant. Third, women who return home as “single mothers” face severe stigma and economic pressures that propel them to continue in a migratory cycle of atonement: an ongoing, self-perpetuating, precarious pattern of migration. Mothers and babies thus reveal the inequalities of citizenship and belonging and the precariousness of migrant labor.

How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited ...
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How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven chapters explore these and other questions here. They concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. The chapters that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies which must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.Less

Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era

Published in print: 1993-10-02

How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven chapters explore these and other questions here. They concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. The chapters that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies which must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.

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